Office of the Chief Information Officer &
High Performance Computing and Communications

Program Management Office

 

Unified Communications: What and Why

 

Mission Statement

The Unified Communications mission is t o replace NOAA's current legacy email, calendar, directory, and telephone systems operating on an aging infrastructure by acquiring resources to plan, design, implement, host and support an integrated unified communications solution(s) having extensibility for new workflows and productivity enhancing features that will provide document management support.

Objectives

  1. To support NOAA's Mission Goals with effective information technology services that enable the delivery of NOAA's key products and services.
  2. To select a service provider(s) to supply NOAA with a comprehensive unified communications solution for NOAA users.
  3. To update the aging and increasingly unreliable email and voice messaging technology currently in use with modern equipment and software.
  4. To create a fully integrated calendaring service.
  5. To create a single authoritative directory infrastructure to support both messaging as well authentication for other NOAA applications.
  6. To create an infrastructure to support collaboration and workflow automation.
  7. To establish video conferencing capability integrated with collaboration tool.


Expected Benefits

The following benefits are expected to be attained by successful implementation of this project:

  1. Provide NOAA with seamlessly integrated unified communications system(s).
  2. Provide all NOAA employees access to their email and calendar in a single application.
  3. Provide direct support for NOAA's Blackberry users, integrating email and calendar with the mobile devices.
  4. Reduced travel costs and increase the workflow efficiencies as a result of collaboration and "webinar" capabilities
  5. Improved Continuity of Operations Programs (COOP) and Disaster Recovery (DR) capabilities.
  6. More efficient response to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.
  7. Ease of integration with identification standards such as HSPD-12.
  8. More stable email environment.
  9. More efficient archiving (ex. including email) and access reducing required storage space.
  10. Integration with all Microsoft Office automation products (i.e. Microsoft Word, Excel, Projects, SharePoint, etc)
  11. Reduced administrative costs by eliminating redundant infrastructure.
  12. Productivity gains from improved timeliness and effectiveness of communications.
  13. A unified technology approach to enterprise voice and text messaging.